Tue, 22 Aug 2017 19:57:36 -0700WeeblyTue, 22 Aug 2017 09:49:15 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/violence-in-charlottesville-cultures-of-hate-cultures-of-resentmentI am not open to debating the merits of racism or bigotry of any kind. I am intolerant of ideological white supremacy, neo-nazism, rape, serial killing, and other cognitive systems that I recognize as intrinsically evil.

I am bewildered by many people now who feel it is fine to downplay overt racism (never mind the systemic bigotry and racism that is the experience of millions of people in their daily lives) over issues like the destruction of property. While I personally do not believe that violence, except in self-defense, is the solution, I also do not believe that the violence of the disorganized members of Antifa is equivalent to the violence of neo-Nazis.

To suggest that such is the case is to completely ignore the intent, motive and ideology behind both groups. The alt-right adheres to an ideology that has at its center ideas that are evil, that dehumanize marginalized people, and that promotes violence and murder. Members of Antifa may be misled -- I am not saying they are necessarily, particularly when their violence in Charlottesville subsisted primary in a defensive posture not aggression contrary to what Trump claimed -- but it is not equivalent to the violence initiated by alt-right groups. To suggest this is the case seems to betray a personal investment to me; it is not clear thinking either rationally or emotionally.

Peace movements have a long history of destroying property, either for symbolic reasons or as a way of sabotaging the enemy. Human life may be sacred, imbued with implicit dignity, but property is not. Rather, the latter is the substance of American idolatry. It is what is referred to in the Declaration of Independence when the authors declare the white man's right to pursue happiness. In context, happiness was understood to be equal with private property. People protesting nuclear armaments, protesting war, protesting poverty, protesting the draft, protesting taxes without representation (Boston tea party) -- the examples are numerous -- have destroyed property. During the Vietnam war, Roman Catholic groups broke into government property and burned draft records, and in some instances had to act with violence against security personnel to subdue them.

The destruction of property is not wrong, prima facie. What people seem to miss is that there is a context behind every act, and the context matters. When you ignore the context, the result is the absurdity of conservatives decrying the destruction of property by protesters during the Vietnam war, but seeming completely oblivious to the destruction of human lives, children and mothers and families. Which is more valuable?

A person's biases surface when their idols are threatened.

What happened in Charlottesville

Those who reacted to the presence of hate as demonstrated by the alt.right in town by peacefully protesting, which was a majority of the protesters, were not Antifa. People who were there make that clear. The Antifa presence stood separately from the other protesters.

Cornel West and those with him, who were surrounded twice by angry white supremacists and Nazis, agree, and West claims that Antifa saved his life.

The protesters made a human chain as an act of nonviolent resistance to prevent the alt.right hate group from entering the park. The alt.right hate group came at the protesters with clubs and semi-automatic weapons. Not the other way around, as Trump claimed. In response, Antifa stood between the protesters and the attacking alt.right group. This was a defensive posture. The alt.right group finally retreated.

Later, a member of the alt.right group drove his Dodge Charger into the crowd and seriously injured nineteen people, and killed one woman.

The blame for this incident does not spread to everyone. The rhetoric of Nazi hate, the Nazi presence, and the young man who wielded his car like a weapon are to blame and that is what should have been addressed by Trump. He refused to do so, and later claimed there were "fine people on all sides." The problem with this is not only that it equates an attack with defense, but it also legitimizes white supremacy as an ideology that can be debated. It puts them on the map. They could not have asked for a greater gift.

A culture of condemnation (a culture of hate)

In the response of The Synod of Bishop of the Orthodox Church in America, the synod of bishops apparently feel the need not only to formally reject racism and bigotry as evidenced in alt-right hate groups, but to reject the "culture of condemnation" directed towards racists and bigots.

While it is true that we who are in the Orthodox Church condemn no one to hell, and seek in a spirit of reconciliation the healing of all, the timing for this injunction seems odd.

People of color in the United States suffer on a daily basis the injustices of being second-class citizens, and of having their very identity assaulted as lesser-than, as unintelligent, as lazy or scheming, as morally suspect -- all based solely on their appearance. Black men and women are far more likely to be pulled over or assaulted or even killed by police than white people. The statistics are overwhelming. As Kia Makarrechi writes for Vanity Fair:

"An independent analysis of Washington Post data on police killings found that, “when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are, in fact, less likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans fatally shot by police.” According to one of the report’s authors, “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black. . . . Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”

It is in this kind of climate that the alt-right appears, fostering violence against anyone who is not white, and shouting out threats against those who they consider to be inferior and to not "belong." It is in this context that a young male white supremacist sped his car through a crowd of non-violent protesters, seriously injuring nineteen people and murdering a young woman. For the Orthodox bishops in the OCA to choose this moment to mention the humanity and value of those who are practicing such violence is telling. For one, it is much like reminding a woman who has just been raped that her rapist is a great asset to the community because he is a star athlete. In other words, it is insulting; it is like rubbing salt in a wound. But more than that, I think it is really a nod to a large vocal subsection of the Orthodox Church who abide in a culture of resentment, who conflate political ideology with Holy Tradition, and long in much the same way that Donald Trump desires to "make America Great again," to hang on to an authoritarian version of the Church that never was and that indeed is not Orthodox.

The culture of resentment

The Orthodox Church in America bishops talked about a culture of condemnation directed towards those on the alt.right, but I have more often seen a more dangerous culture of resentment that informs an Orthodox ethos that is corrupted by it.

Resentment of "secularism" that does not take seriously the claims of Orthodox tradition undermines a lot of the rhetoric stemming from rigorist Orthodox Christian clergy and laity alike. Resentment fuels the denial of climate change (which some prominent priests promote) and evolutionary theory. Anything that smacks of "progress" away from a pretend version of morality that is rooted in a political narrative, not Holy Tradition (though the former often substitutes for the latter) is not rejected on its lack of merit, but largely from a spirit of resentment and assumed victim-hood.

These Orthodox fully-embrace the right-wing propaganda that suggests "secularists" are engaged in an all out war against Christianity that might even be found in the way some people or businesses choose to greet one another during the Christmas season. The poor are resented for "getting something for nothing," the marginalized are resented for reparations, the educated are resented for being "elitists," ad nuaseaum. It is this kind of resentment that propelled Donald Trump to the office of the Presidency. It is a resentment easily discovered on numerous Orthodox websites online, and present in parishes throughout the United States.

So when the alt.right seeks to flex its organizational muscles and show that they are a real presence, and that they really do reflect an ideology of hate, marching through the streets with semi-automatic weapons, and these people respond not by rejecting that kind of ideology but rather by seeking to share the blame, one has to wonder if there is not some semblance of identification with what the alt.right stand for, which is basically an absolute decimation of civility in the name of nationalistic pride and tradition, founded on resentment. A resentment that I think is shared.

I believe this shared resentment is what motivates so many Orthodox not only to become stiff rigorists who substitute closed-mindedness for integrity, but also to be on the defensive whenever there is a clear reason to question the motives and actions of the status quo, to blame the victim, and to "share the blame."

]]>Thu, 06 Apr 2017 19:34:23 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/some-informal-reflections-on-timeThe physicist Michio Kaku claims that the possibility for time travel could be discovered through a precise mathematical exploration into the quantum realm.

That may be, but biologically, memory can serve us well in floating the past to the surface of the present, or even projecting both into various possibilities for the future.

There is a sense I get, when remembering, or reading history, that differs from my conception before, and that is that things that happen occur in the moment, just as my thought regarding things that just happened occur in the moment. it is almost as though one can sense the energy, or feel the movement or echo of what might have occurred “a long time ago”.

The present moment must of course be a priority, but the past seems to have been just here, to be indelibly etched into the space-time continuum, so that perhaps I might still hear the voice of a long lost friend, or see myself doing something I regretted for many years later. I am no longer acting that way, but I am still acting that way. Yet, I cannot reach out and prevent myself from making a bad decision that I have already made. I can however, reach forward into the realm of possibility, which can also seem just as defined as the past.

In memory I am three years old, and we are in a large truck being driven by a stranger. We are in a bed of mud. I look down and begin to navigate my way out of the truck, but my dad tells me to stay where I am. he is wearing boots. he and the stranger walk a few feet from the truck. I know now that this is where our home will be built.

I am six years old, running between the trees on the other side of the creek behind our house. I am climbing the trees. There are turtles and crawdads in the creek. The pool at the end is filled with tadpoles. At night, lightening bugs dance in our back yard. There is a whippoorwill, a fact I would not have noticed unless it was pointed out by my dad. I am more intrigued with the name of the creature than the sound it makes. My brother, shorter than me with slender shoulders, allows me for a while to direct him by placing my hand on his neck, then complains. I tell him I am a ghost. We are carried away by the story. My brother believes it and I no longer see him because he hides under the bed. I am thick with imagination. “I am a ghost, but I won’t hurt you,” I tell my brother. From the vantage of the present, the me who is speaking in the past does not know that it is true.

I am still in the fifth grade, walking home through the orchards slowly with my friends. And I am still arriving late to the first day of college in Twin Peaks, CA after driving the length of California from Klamath Falls, OR and asking the young, light bright-blonde haired girls in the office where to go. I am still driving the streets of San Bernardino in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, tension thick in the air, in the midnight hours, seeking to do a good deed.

I am playing imaginary games with my brother and sister in the living room, and telling my brother that I am a ghost and not a living person. Still lifting lumber and working 12 hour shifts in the winter cold at the sawmill in Lakeview, OR. And I am holding my newborn babies, all three, all at once, for the first time. And I am writing a novel in my crib. Still arriving in Lawrence, KS, in Huntington, WV, in Kansas City, and in Albuquerque, NM by bus and getting into the first taxi cab I see with no idea about Albuquerque, or where I will live, what I will do, who I will know. I am still committing a social faux pas, still seeking redemption, down on my knees, in a Mexican church listening to a language I understand but do not comprehend.

And sitting in a cubicle at the St. Louis Art Museum, and riding the bus home. I am still pushing my son in the swing, pushing my daughter in the swing, still swinging, looking down at the ground below me and imagining small cities and smaller people thousands of feet below. I am still composing sonnets in the womb, and telling my mother a story as she lifts me into my first experience of the light of day.

In his Confessions, St. Augustine writes:

"For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. Yet I say with confidence, that I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time. Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not; and the future is not as yet? But should the present be always present, and should it not pass into time past, time truly it could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present — if it be time — only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be — namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be?"

The conflation or confusion, or possible paradox, between time as a coordinate of the known universe (manifest in conjunction with three apparent spatial coordinates) and eternity is a puzzle difficult if not impossible to untangle. I have the suspicion, however, that the past and future are not, as it would seem, mere constructs of memory as abstraction, or as I have already suggested merely a biological phenomenon, neurons firing in the nervous system. Rather, I wonder if memory itself is not somehow appended to eternity, and eternity entangled in the mystery of the present in union with eternity, the sacrament of now spreading itself out?

]]>Sat, 16 Jul 2016 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/being-a-person-in-a-culture-of-consumptionOnce upon a time, we identified more with the work that we did and the things that we made than we did with what we consumed. In overtly stratified societies, roles were easily delineated, and had the potential to provide a source of security and comfort

Marx claimed that one of the the consequences of industrialization is that it separates us from our own nature. Since he believed that a part of what makes us human is our ability to connect with the fruit of our own labors, the reality of industrialism, which produced the assembly line, damaged the implicit meaning of work. If we are no longer connected with what we produced, he thought, we live at a point of tension and conflict, which produces a sense of rootlessness that has no meaning.

He did not anticipate, perhaps, the possibility that a consumer culture could resolve anomie and serve us by providing social roles, norms, values and ideals the same way that religion and stratified social constrictions did in the past. Yet, I have to wonder what regarding myself as a consumer and everything in the world around me as commodities does to my personhood. Can a person be a genuine person in a culture of consumption?

That's a heady question. Instead of trying to answer it, I am going to suggest ways that I actively seek to retain aspects of my personhood in what I consider to be a destructive culture.

1. I give up certainty. We all have human needs, but certainty is not one of them. In fact, it is far more rational to admit you do not know than to structure your life around a feeling dressed up as an opinion. Let mystery in. It’s okay, and should be a relief to some, to recognize that not only are you not required to know everything or to be right about everything, it is also impossible.

Once I get past the facade of the “me” that is based on my habits of consumption, I may find that I have a soul that is deep with mystery and uncertainty, a realm of exploration and discovery that uses creative and imaginative and spiritual tools as ways of knowing, which can be more fulfilling and meaningful than the pursuit and experience of pleasure for its own sake, which is often the objective of consumerism.

Once I can get past that temporal and passing objective, I can start to see the world, including my body and the whole world of matter, as related to an eternal perspective beyond present utilitarian value. This is where prayer, contemplation and mindfulness come in, and can powerfully break the restraints and falsehoods of myopic consumer identities.

2. I am aware of what I consume. The writer, farmer and opponent of consumer culture, Wendell Berry speaks to the mirage of consumer pleasures this way:

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”

It’s especially important as our resources deplete and demand overruns supply that we think about what we consume and why, not only in terms of food, but in every area of life. The movement to buy food locally from farmers you know is a great place to start learning.

3. I buy good books and read them, not just for entertainment, but to learn how to think. Literacy is more important now than it has ever been as it teaches one how to process cognition, as well as exercises the imagination, which is the basis for compassion. In short, read more, and be aware.

4. I try to break the spell of advertising. I do not watch network TV, but I still see thousands of ads a week. I seek to consciously evaluate my needs so that I can effectively resist the subversive lessons that are being sold through advertising and other media. Do you really need a car that talks to you? Will the latest gadget really increase your happiness? Is a successful family really one that looks a certain way and lives in a certain kind of home? Do you really have to hate the bad guys to feel good about yourself? Are pursuing money and working hard really the highest virtues?

Breaking the spell of advertising requires patience, humility, gratitude and generosity. These are attributes anyone has the potential to build. But first, you have to understand that the promise of consumer culture is empty. It is a pipe dream.

Next, recall the words of Epictetus when he writes:

Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.

In order words, stop trying to control reality and learn how to live in it. The release of tension is well worth it!

5. I try to be content and grateful for what I have in any circumstance, and it is a powerful way to resist the hooks of consumer culture.

6. I seek to be reconciled with the world of things. The weird thing about a consumer culture is that we do not value the things that we have, but still always think we need more.

In fact, while many call ours a “materialistic culture”, that’s something of a misnomer because we do not value matter at all. Our consumption uses things up and discards them. We do this on the local level as well as on the macroeconomic level. We are in the process of using up the planet’s resources in a way that may bring devastating effects. Our rape of the nature for the sake of our own pleasure does not reflect an appropriate valuing of matter.

7. I seek ways to give attention to others. With the intent of bringing about the best possible good for other people as well as for myself, I try to give my full attention to whoever is in front of me. It is a small step, but the first step of loving others, both neighbors and enemies, as if I were in their shoes.As such, it shatters the illusion that we ourselves are all consumer commodities, an idea opposed to love, that can be bought and sold, controlled, coerced and manipulated. Love is, after all, integral to what is means to be a human person, and more than anything else can break the illusion that we are ultimately subjects enslaved to the marketplace.

]]>Fri, 15 Jul 2016 21:05:08 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/progress-utopia-and-the-kingdom-of-god​With so much complexity, constant change and consequent threats to privilege, power and identity occurring at a spectacular pace, the need for certainty and simplicity becomes not only real, but a necessary resolution for conquering the disorienting impact of fear.

One of the primary characteristics of fundamentalism is the use of confirmation bias, but this merely speaks to a deeper issue that is part and parcel of living in a complex world, which directly relates to questions pertaining to truth claims and moral difficulty. And it isn’t just that the world is complex, but it is filled with an unmanageable increase in information and exponentially changing technology, both of which are unparalleled with any other time in history. Speed is one of the promises of capitalist industrialism, implicit to the modernist assumption, carrying the triumphal connotations of human progress.

Postmodern assumptions tend to threaten long-held assumptions, challenge social constructs, and threaten the leverage and privilege dominant cultures have and believe to be their rightful domain. With so much complexity, constant change and consequent threats to privilege, power and identity occurring at a spectacular pace, the need for certainty and simplicity becomes not only real, but a necessary resolution for conquering the disorienting impact of fear.

If the progress of modernity tends to dismantle or even overtly reject one’s own status and identity, fear as a centering reaction is almost inevitable, especially if one’s assumptions are allowed to exist on the basis of bad faith, wherein questioning one’s assumptions is itself considered to be a sign of weakness or a sin, or even a notion advanced by the devil. At worst, questioning one’s own assumptions might be understood as caving to modernism itself, which in its pursuit of progress seeks utopian ideals that are counter to the certainties of one’s own fundamentalist distinctive beliefs, which are reified, or thingified, as part of the natural order.

There are a number of social constructs, which one must remember are extremely strong arbiters of identity and the employment of power by dominant cultures, and not weakened merely by the fact that they are socially constructed, that are ostensibly “under attack” in the so-called culture wars that have been engaging public life in America for the last several decades. Race, gender and class are three of the big ones. Dominant cultures in relation to these three include those who are white, those who are male, and those who are wealthy. I happen to fit two out of the three criteria - I will leave it to the reader to guess which two.

My heritage as someone who is privileged has included the interpellation of values - not just directly through the theological apparatus of the church and its rationales for inequality, but also through living in the west as an American who has participated in a civil religion that has borrowed its stripped values of niceness from Puritanism - with which I have identified and that substantiate stratified social constructs.

I was explicitly taught as a Protestant fundamentalist that some of the values imbued in these constructs are absolute, that they come directly from God and that they are revealed in nature.

I recall well after my conversion when I was nineteen years old being taught by a fundamentalist teacher who briefly mentored me that it was a sin for women to work, that the place of women was in the home where their unique gifts, imbued in them due to their femininity or femaleness, could only flourish in its proper place. In 1986, such an idea was still strong, at least a decade after the Equal Rights Amendment failed, but well into second wave feminism.

It was present in my community, where I bombastically assailed my friends with the good news of my conversion, and preached to them, having a few of them baptized in my backyard swimming pool, about how they too could become like me. My mother was pressured to feel guilty for having a job, and some weird Christian even told her that perhaps her purpose in life was to have given birth to me. I can imagine this church lady even though I wasn’t there when she said it. I see her wide-eyed with piety and nodding her head, and extremely nice, basically telling my mom that she had very limited value as a person, a mimicry of the standard marginalizing assumption that a woman’s primary worth lies in her sex organs.

All of these ideas in which I was enmeshed terrify and embarrass me now, not because I have seen the light of progressive politics and am looking forward to some future utopia where men and women are the same. God forbid! My thinking has changed as a direct result of a long relationship and experience of Orthodoxy, which includes wrestling and questioning my own assumptions, motives, thoughts and ambitions, and inculcating values that are directed towards the personal and are expressive of seeking justice in the world, rooted in the synopsis of ethics that Jesus teaches in the sermon on the mount and sums up in the Beatitudes.

With that more or less configuring the backdrop of my world view, my understanding of progress is not aligned at all with secular utopianism, but I am not opposed to the idea of progress, per se. I have heard well-meaning, nice Christians say that the end of history is in God’s hands as a way of debunking progress. The implicit assumption is that any desire to make human progress is a sell-out to modernity and an attempt to steal the show and take the reins from God’s sovereign hand. But because the values that I gather from my experience of Christianity in the Orthodox Church embrace the kingdom of God as an eschatological reality that is present with us now, and includes creative moral freedom coupled with human responsibility, what I take to be Orthodoxy 101, others might understand as appealing to some kind of abstract idea of "progress."

Having said that, I should admit my own bias. Many times I hear a critique of progress as an investment in inequality, a continued suppression of those who are already marginalized. A false dichotomy plays out between so-called "progressives" -- who think, for example, that women should be treated as fully human and not servants, which might pragmatically include ideas such as equal pay for doing the same job -- and "conservatives" who adhere to what are ostensibly labeled "family values." But if we are really just talking about justice, there is nothing "progressive" about rejecting racism or sexism. Rather, it is just a fulfillment of love and the righting of wrongs, no matter how entrenched or systemic they might be.

If that is how we define progress, then I do not see any conflict in seeking social progress as an objective of being a human being in the world, especially when it leads to justice. We may not be responsible for the ultimate outcome of history, but we are definitely responsible for each other within history. The Hebrew prophets who condemned nations for the way they treated those who were marginalized, including foreigners *see just for one example, Hosea), makes that clear.​My idea of progress is related to the only feasible utopia, which is the kingdom of God, but it is not motivated by seeking to spread the kingdom of God in an abstract or external, coercive way. Such an assumption misses the point.

When Jesus started out, this is the gospel that he preached. The kingdom of God is within you.It is not an external system or construct that can be forced on citizenry, though such attempts have been tried in the past, and are continuously being made today by the Christian right through appeals to moral law, and the conflation of abstract and depersonalized morality with politics and culture.

But that’s not what the kingdom of God is. It is an inward, personal and communal reality that is expressed from the inside and always moves towards the outside; it begins small like a seed and grows into a large tree.

Jesus in fact speaks of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven as a mustard seed that is planted, but then grows and becomes a large tree. The potential inherent in a small seed to become a tree implies a progression of growth and understanding. The birds of the air cannot rest in the branches of a seed that has the implied tree within it. It has to develop and become a tree, and that development and growth may speak to an idea of progress that emphasizes responsibility and healing rather than social adjustments and technology.

James Hillman, a psychoanalyst and student of C.G. Jung, famously writes about the fallacy of valorizing growth for the sake of growth as a virtue in itself. Growth is for children, he reasons, and the fact that we live in a culture obsessed with growth is evidence of a lack of maturity, or of fullness, or to put it another way, lack of healing. Hillman correlates the lack of maturity, as well as egregious and ego-driven politics, to a cultural fascination with the child archetype. If one continues to pursue growth as an end, he says, after he has already grown up, it is not a good thing. It opens up the potential for death, not a more enriched life. The overgrowth of cells become cancer.

Similar ideas may be appended to our notions of progress. Human progress does not portend growth for growth’s sake, or even a teleology that supposes an advancement into earthly political utopia. We may progress, however, as a church into the gradual fulfillment of what it means to be the kingdom of Heaven, and insofar as the influence of the church is felt in the surrounding society, it also benefits others and conditions improve for everyone.

The progress implied here does not suggest building utopia from the ground up solely through reason. The utopia already exists. It has been planted like a seed in our hearts, as well as in the church, and the church in the soil of the surrounding culture. This suggests potential, not determinism; a seed needs to be planted in good soil, nurtured, watered and tended.

The idea, however, that the kingdom of God may grow into a full tree and into maturity suggests development, interaction with the environment, and, as was the case for Jesus, growth in wisdom and stature. That is the kind of human progress which I suggest is our calling not only as a church, and not only as Christians, but as human beings.

​And this, really, is the salvific goal and the meaning of healing and wholeness: not to become good Christians, not even to be Christians, but to become and be genuine human beings, or, to put it in hopefully more lucid terms, to become who we are whatever that looks like.

​Such an understanding tends to shatter many of the fundamentalist ideas rooted in fear and rather offers a perspective of humanity redeemed — all of humanity, all of humanity valuable, worthy of respect and love, even and especially those who are marginalized, the subaltern and abject who stand as objects of stigma when abstractions, due to reasons of fear and invested identity, are preferred over the personal.

]]>Tue, 12 Jul 2016 12:13:24 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/fundamentalism-and-cognitive-biasI stumbled into fundamentalism by making a common assumption: I’d become a Christian because I wanted to know and follow the Truth, and being a fundamentalist merely meant adhering to the “fundamentals” of faith.

This is of course what the fundamentalist thinks and would have others to believe, but often what is fundamental to Christian fundamentalists is not and was never fundamental to the Christian church at large or historically.

Consider for instance a particular doctrine, such as the imminent return of Jesus in the clouds meeting those who have been saved in the sky, all of whom are changed in an instant, leaving behind the rest of the world to suffer through tribulation followed by an anti-Christ figure who leads the world for seven years, culminating in the last judgment. The basic doctrine is known as the “rapture,” and many Protestant fundamentalists consider it to be one of the basic building-blocks of the faith, so much so that if one does not believe in it one may not really be born again or saved, or worse, one of those who will be caught up in the clouds with Christ when the time comes.

The doctrine of the rapture is clothed with other abstract eschatological positions, such as whether or not one is pre, mid or post-tribulation, a question concerning when the rapture will occur in terms of the tribulation, each position backed by a number of theories based on various readings of the Bible.

There may be variations of disagreement allowed, but some for many fundamentalist sects, this particular apocalyptic view is a fundamental when in fact such a view is very recent in the history of the church.

The point is that sects adopt specific views as being important and vital to the faith that measured by history are not at all dogmatic, or non-negotiable truths central to the witness and life of Christians since the very beginning. Fundamentalists have a tendency to hone in on distinctive doctrines and bloat them until they become central to what it means to belong, or to the identity of the group, in other words, and rejecting beliefs such as the rapture may be thought of as aberrant, or nominal or even heretical.

One would think that the available history on such matters would have some bearing on how significant interesting and new doctrinal formulations might truly be to the church. But it isn’t, and that has to do with reasons that are relevant to the formal beginning of fundamentalism as a radical reaction to modernism in the early part of the twentieth century.

The Reformation, deeply intertwined and influenced with the Renaissance in a way that is similar to the conflation of fundamentalism and modernism today, locked in the Lutheran proclamation of sola Scriptura as the basis of Christian revelation and authority.

The Protestant distinctive that dogmatically affirmed the Bible as the sole and final arbiter of special revelation to the church and world played itself to some of its logical conclusions during sectarian infighting among American Presbyterians and others. Never mind that this view of Scripture, which isolates Biblical texts from context and reduces them to a kind of analytic methodology that at least mimics the modernist liberal hermeneutic that had threatened Christian identity in the United States, is also not found as a dogma or creed in the history of the church since the beginning.

The result is a rigid, black-and-white, affirmation as dogma that not only is “Scripture alone” a fundamental truth of the faith, but so is the resultant idea that the Bible is also infallible and inerrant. Such a stance demanded that every word of the Bible be perspicuous (in other words, clear and easy to understand), and at least implied that the Bible should by-and-large be taken literally, rejecting the vast literature from the Church fathers going back at least fifteen hundred years that offered numerous figurative, mythic, metaphorical and allegorical interpretations of texts.

These distinctive doctrines affirmed the foundation of American fundamentalism as expressed primarily in the Protestant and evangelical church without any note of irony whatsoever to betray the fact that every single one of them was an innovation, and had never been considered fundamental to Christian belief since the beginning of the church. It becomes easy to see that fundamentalism really has little to do with adhering to the fundamentals of the faith, even though fundamentalists will claim that each distinctive is in fact and has always been the truth, but that only remnants of Christians have adhered to it, the faithful few on the narrow road of salvation.

Or, at any rate, there is no need to elaborate a justification for ignoring history or context precisely because the Bible clearly and literally expresses each distinctive as the Word of God, and since one of the distinctive doctrines is that the Bible is clear in expressing revealed Truth, one can trust it, or have faith in the truths that are being revealed. The fact that the doctrine of inerrancy and its corollary regarding perspicuity is itself deemed to be true on the basis of nothing but its own claim seems to be the elephant in the room.

And so, as a young fundamentalist, I had faith in the clarity of the Bible because the Bible said it was clear and the all-sufficient arbiter of divine revelation, even though the Bible really doesn’t ever, anywhere, say that. If I make the claim that it does say that, I have to argue my case, which at least intimates that either I am more righteous or more reasonable or more knowledgeable than anyone who disagrees with me, or the Bible isn’t really perspicuous - a contradiction of the claim.

I understood the necessity of the claim, though, in terms of functioning in a way that I thought the Bible was supposed to function. It was supposed to not only introduce me to God, but provide principles for living my life. To a large degree, for me and everyone I knew at the time, this meant that the Scriptures primarily informed my belief system, or as I was fond of saying then, my “world view.” It didn’t really seem too odd to me that its clarity seemed to depend on my acceptance of doctrines that started out as hypotheses not usually initially indicated in the text.

So, when I was a charismatic who could proof-text the need for a baptism of the Holy Spirit, whereby one was empowered by God and given the gifts of the Holy Spirit (evidence by the phenomenon of speaking in tongues), the Bible seemed really clear on the subject. It perplexed me that anyone could argue to the contrary.

And later, when I was a five-point Calvinist who thought God gave us all five fingers on each hand so that we could more easily memorize the doctrines of grace as summarized by the acronym TULIP, the way that the Scriptures fell into an extreme clear pattern to confirm all this was astonishing. The fact that numerous people could not see it was shocking to me.

I did not want to assume that I was just better or holier and able to understand the otherwise clear Scriptures than they, but I did anyway. After all, if the Bible is the sole authority, then it must also be perspicuous; and if others are not seeing it as I do, they must have bad motives or be invested in erroneous conclusions. I guess I could excuse myself through an appeal to youth (I was in my mid-20s). But I was utterly convinced that what I believed was Truth, and anyone who disagreed was either ignorant of the Scriptures, immoral, illiterate, or heretical.It did not occur to me that the Scriptures seemed just as clear to detractors as it did to me, or even that what I thought was clear might have come across as a bit more obscure to others, and legitimately so.

Now, however, I realize how powerful confirmation bias is, and what a strong role this cognitive error plays as a factor in determining personal belief.

Confirmation bias is an unconscious process in which I favor information that supports my hypothesis. It is not a conscious act, but one of the products of human finitude, and it takes some training to try not to do it; even then, I don’t think anyone is free of it. It impacts personal relationships, as well as affirms social constructs and the schematic shorthand that overwhelmingly substitutes for actual engagement with people or information.

Think of a common hypothesis that appends to constructs having to do with poverty in the United States, such as: poor people are lazy, drug-addled, users of the system, etc. As is usually the case, the abject and weakest members of society are the scapegoats for its illnesses.

Confirmation bias would seek to prove the hypothesis rather than disprove it - the latter is the scientific method; the former is an error. In proving the hypothesis, one automatically and unconsciously selects evidence that favors it, such as listening to narratives about people on food stamps using their allotment to buy items deemed to be unnecessary. (The fundamental attribution error plays into this as well, since often items deemed to be unnecessary to others are often okay and justified to oneself.) One may then see someone use their food stamp money while texting on a cell phone. Or, one may see someone use their food stamp card to purchase junk food. One might notice that the person on food stamps is overweight. One may watch a family on food stamps drive off from the store in a nice car, or at least one in better condition than one’s own.

All of these observations collect to provide a narrative of evidence that proves the hypothesis, and then the proofing stops. A multitude of factors may be at play here to motivate bias, including political ideology or even envy - envy of the poor who seem to be getting something for nothing often underlies the rhetoric of forcible austerity.

There is no questioning of the evidence, and no seeking to disprove the hypothesis, which is the only way to substantially deal with bias. If you cannot disprove the hypothesis, then it can be accepted - not as absolute truth, but for further consideration, research and investigation. But when confirmation bias occurs, there is no attempt at all to disprove the hypothesis, and personal bias is not even remotely addressed.

As a result, confirmation bias reaffirms and substantiates wrong conclusions, reification of social constructs, poor polity that secures the powerful and marginalizes the disempowered, and even bad theology, which is also used to substantiate and justify all of the foregoing.But one of the odd and perhaps unfortunate realities about how the mind works is how amazingly convincing our experiences and biases can be. Especially referent to my own experience of clarity in terms of finding first Pentecostal/Charismatic doctrinal evidence in the Scriptures, then finding clear Calvinist doctrines there, and then a little later, finding post-millennial, Reconstructionist concepts there. People in the church who know their lingo call this proof-texting, and that’s basically what confirmation bias is.

We set out to prove our biases, but not just in relation to a text we assume is inerrant, but in the whole play and action of living. Seeking to disprove our biases, challenge conventions, dismantle constructs and question orthodoxies is a far more reliable method for at least shaking off the fog of bias that clouds and distorts perception.

The need to eliminate bias is not only intrinsic to the process of thought and investigation in scientific research and studies, but it is further employed through both repetition and peer review. In less scientific realms where belief is involved it is no less important, ranging from one’s personal world view and the formulation of opinion to team projects in business and enterprise to Church councils, canons and creeds.

Even in these situations, such as a peer review journal or a team meeting that decides, for example, whether or not to send a space shuttle into orbit, there are still cognitive problems that arise due to group dynamics, including the acceptance of normative values that may be contingent upon faulty social constructs. The oppression of women due to gender constructs, not allowing women basic citizenship rights such as to vote (for example) was often robustly justified in peer review religious and scientific journals, as well as affirmed by both religious canon and secular legal courts, including the Supreme Court.

​Confirmation bias and the unquestioning acceptance of values cuts right to the heart of the matter, and jumps to error without even bothering with critical thought. The reality is that this is largely how people in United States culture operate. We value our personal opinions; our opinions are based almost completely on our biases, our biases are informed by the apparatuses of convention, and when challenged we merely seek to prove our opinions to be factual rather than question our own assumptions. Proving bias is easy. Knowing what is true and what is not can be much more difficult.

]]>Tue, 12 Jul 2016 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/what-makes-you-feel-safe-and-secureWhen compared with modern culture, Jesus really seems to get everything backwards. Any financial planner will tell you it is wise to plan for the future for the sake of your personal security. But if that is the basis of your security, Jesus is liable to call you out.

I do not know how many times I have read the parable of the fool in the Gospel of Luke. It's the one where the rich man has a huge harvest, and he says to himself that he will destroy his barns and build bigger ones. Once the bigger barns are built, he figures, "I'll say to myself ... you have many goods stored up for many years; take your ease: eat, drink and be merry." In response to this, God says, "You fool! Tonight you are going to die and then whose will those things be which you have provided?"

When I first read this passage more than twenty years ago, I thought Jesus was condemning eating, drinking and merrymaking, and that superficial interpretation kind of stuck. But it isn't what he is saying at all. Jesus is rather pointing out the problem of putting one's trust in things or circumstances on the one hand, and on the other the difficulty of never being able to find satisfaction -- never arriving at the point where one can actually eat, drink and be merry, or, as it were, enter the moment.

I may think I'm not like that, though. I'm the exception. I wouldn't be like the rich man who isn't satisfied with his profits! If I only had the chance, a huge harvest, or a lottery win, for instance. I wouldn't seek to build bigger barns, but would begin the merrymaking immediately. I promise.

​Isn't it odd how such statements amount to the same thing the rich man declares when he decides to enjoy his life once the bigger barns are built, and that by saying such things I prove myself to be exactly like him? My entrance into the moment is, like the rich man’s, contingent on something else, bigger barns and stored-up wealth, winning the lottery, getting a great job, buying a house, marrying, or…fill in the blank.

This realization struck a deep chord in me. We can appreciate the gift of each moment we have now; it does not need to be draped in a more perfect circumstance in order for us to receive it. The gift lies before us in each instant, moment to moment, building into hours and days, and the only appropriate response is gratitude and enjoyment. The gift of God, of life, of happiness and contentment does not lie in the things we own or in the particular circumstances in which we live. And when we realize this and detach ourselves from the need for such things, this is really what it means to be poor in spirit.

The reality of the principle should have always been clear to me given the context of the parable. It is preceded by the request of someone in the crowd to whom Jesus is speaking. A young man wants Jesus to arbitrate a dispute. He says, "Tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." Jesus refuses, and instead says, "Beware of covetousness. Your life does not consist in the abundance of the things you possess." Then he gives the parable of the fool, whose life is required of him that night, and to whom God asks, "Whose will those things be which you have provided?"

What a huge issue in a consumerist culture. We work hard, and things are our reward. Ownership becomes the first right and the final virtue. From a young age we are reared on advertising and occupational optimism. There are multitudes of goods to acquire that purport to make you happy, and if you put enough effort into it, you can be anything you want to be!

The more money you make, the happier you will be. The more things you acquire, the more fulfilled you will be as a person, but more than that, you will be a better person, a person of worth, because in a consumerist culture the person who contributes to wealth the most has the greatest value. The more value, the more privileges you win -- the big house, the nice car, the health care. One's existence is justified by being a productive member of society, and to not be productive, or to be poor, in this scheme, is to be unjust, is shameful, and is demonized and stigmatized.

There are some who teach that real faith will result in riches, that wealth and consumption are the satisfying fruits of trusting God, and therefore the poor are obviously those who lack faith. Just send a dollar, and God will arrange for you to get back at least ten, if not a hundred. Despite the fact that in most cases this is an obvious scam, it's interesting how many people fall for it that see affluence as its own reward, who on some level believe that comfort and possessions equate to the salvific experience and consist of life's final meaning.

But if I try to find meaning in possessions I'm never able to attain that plateau which has been promised in the fog of material wealth, so I continue to male plans and solid investments, to build bigger and bigger barns with no end in sight. Contentment is just around the corner. One thing is acquired, and then suddenly something new is needed. Jesus says that one's life does not consist in the abundance of the things one possesses.

Jesus tells the man, “Beware of covetousness. Your life does not consist in the abundance of the things you possess.” The Christian philosopher Rene Girard bases much of his work on the word “covetousness”, which may also be rendered as “desire”. In this passage Jesus warns against desire as the locomotion of acquisitiveness. Girard takes it to the next step and elaborately shows through the Scriptures and other religious texts, in literature and myth, and in the history of humanity that we not only desire an abundance of things, but we desire to have the particular things that belong to others.

We see other people fulfill or seek to fulfill their desires, and a desire is born for the same object the other desires. The object is less important than the desire. Desire is born from a concrete witness, which is why modern advertising works so well. In the Old Testament vernacular, God commands that we not covet or desire the neighbor’s ox, or ass, or wife. The type of covetousness brought to the fore here is one that borrows or replicates desire from one’s neighbor; therefore Girard names it mimetic desire. It mimes the desires one sees that his neighbor has fulfilled, and because my neighbor wants, I also want.

Mimetic desire, per Girard, is then therefore the source of the conflict that leads to scapegoating, violence and war. Girard elaborates on the story of Cain and Abel and shows that because Abel acquired something that Cain did not have, the blessing of God, Cain’s desire for what Abel has leads him to commit the first human murder.

In the case of the brother who wants Jesus to coerce a division of the inheritance, we see mimetic desire play out as if on cue. The man wants what his brother has, not unlike the story of Cain and Abel. But instead of murdering his brother, he comes to Jesus and asks him to use his authority to influence the brother. The answer that Jesus gives does not address whether or not the inheritance should fairly be split, or what the man actually deserves in legal terms, but rather, it speaks directly to the man’s desire, his covetousness. He tells him, “your life does not consist in possessions” and he then proceeds with the parable.

The error of the fool in Christ’s parable is not only to imagine that his life and security can be found in affluence, but that his things actually belong to him, that he actually owns them. The implication might be that one who owns something therefore does not have any responsibility towards those who do not have what he has. In fact, mimetic desire plays a significant role here as well, when those who have, see the desire of those who do not.

Even though the fool already owns all that he needs, he copies the desire of others to have what he has and in competition clings to his own possessions even more, motivated by the conflict to build even bigger barns rather than be content and share what he already has with others.

The interior contrast that Jesus is driving at here is stark. We can attach ourselves to what we have to the point where it drives us to a kind of madness in which we begin to accumulate even more things, driven by covetousness or mimetic desire, and put off being happy until later; or we can be content with what we have – eat, drink and be merry – and acknowledge that in fact we don’t even own what we have, that it belongs rightfully to others as well.

St. Ambrose writes, "The things which we cannot take with us are not ours. Only virtue will be our companion when we die." St. John Chrysostom, in his sermon on poverty and wealth, says there is no need to build bigger barns, that we already have all the barns that we need, "the stomachs of the poor."

These statements are absolutely contrary to our culture in which we imagine that we work in order to own what we have and that our life consists of all the things we accumulate.

Property and money become closer to us than our neighbor, more important to us than genuine virtue, and this plays itself out in the way we live, in our frustrations over things that break or get lost or stolen, in our fear of losing what we have, in our fear of the poor whom we castigate and blame for their plight because we are afraid of becoming like them.

And yet, as I begin to really look into the meaning behind the text, there is this truly startling realization that Jesus is calling us, all of us who are His followers, to become like the poor, to walk the edge of uncertainty, and even to stop putting our faith in all the things that naturally make us feel secure, whether money stored in the bank or food stored in the barn.

I feel more secure when I have enough cash in my account to cover next month’s rent. We feel secure when we have food in our cupboards, clothes to wear, and lights. For some reason I cannot explain I get this really pleasant feeling of being secure late at night when I hear the dishwasher running, or the heater blowing through the vents in the winter, or when the air conditioner comes on in the summer. I am guessing my feeling stems from the reality that to have a dishwasher, a heater, central air and even lights is a fantastic luxury that I take for granted.

​I do not believe Jesus is saying that it is wrong to feel safe, or to feel a sense of relief that you’ve got the rent covered and food in the cupboard. I do not think that Jesus is teaching morality in terms of right and wrong here at all, or at least, not in the terms that we tend to think of ethics and morality in our era. What I think Jesus is really getting at has more to do with one’s interior connection towards these things, whether they are really finally essential to our well-being, or if we can let go of them if we need to do so, and if we will actually do so when the time comes. He is addressing the condition of our souls, not just our external behaviors.

]]>Mon, 11 Jul 2016 20:48:40 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/some-personal-thoughts-on-prayerPrayer can be a touchy subject whether one is a Christian or not because in some sense it is really where your mettle is proven. Along my own path I've been subjected to a variety of practices, and still find it to be a difficult endeavor.

I'm no expert on prayer. Endeavoring to write about it summons a few risks to consciousness, such as the risk of presenting myself as something I am not like those religious leaders who foreclosed on their heavenly rewards, the risk of seeming more spiritual than I am, or, more likely, exposing how bereft I am to readers who possess greater knowledge and wisdom. But this is not meant to be a primer or a word of advice. It's just me sharing a few thoughts on prayer that occur to me after engaging in the practice for some time.

Aside from my first prayers of the now I lay me down to sleep and God bless so-and-so variety, in which, not insignificantly, I felt perhaps the analog to or actual endorphins sweep through me after half an hour of asking for blessings on others, as well as imagined or felt the heavy presence of some other -- God? -- in the darkness of the bedroom -- I first began to really pray after I became a Christian at the age of eighteen.

As a Protestant, prayers are meant to be spontaneous and personal expressions, not overly-formal or rigid repetitions, which Jesus also frowned upon. A pastor who prayed with me early on began his prayers, "Oh heavenly father," in a tremulous baritone voice which sounded right to me, so I began my own talks with God in that manner as well. Paul also says that we should "pray unceasingly." This was more difficult than it seems. The gist to me seemed to be merely turning the discursive thoughts always churning away in my brain towards God in a constant impromptu monologue. It's not only difficult, but impossible. I know. I tried it.

As a pray-er early on, trying to keep up some sort of elated feeling as well as a discourse to God unceasingly made me feel as sinful as theologically (as a sinner whose righteousness was, as the prophet declaims, "filthy rags, and then a Calvinist) I believed that I was. The facticity and physicality of my body made me feel dirty. And trying to pray constantly as a mental effort was just too exhausting. I recall once during "quiet time" as a missionary in YWAM taking a walk through a gorgeous garden, alone, and imagining Jesus, trying, it seemed, to summon a vision of him, some kind of response. I realized quickly that what I was doing bordered on idolatry, that I could well be praying to myself and my own imaginative image of God, and dropped it.

Unlike some, I have never been the type of person to hear God's voice, or to whom God disclosed specific responses when I prayed. If I did feel any kind of impression from God, it was always subject to my zealous skepticism, and never broadcast by me to anyone; prayer was a struggle, whispering in a vacuous room in which I was ostensibly alone with God and God was incredibly silent.

The logical response, of course, was that God is not silent, but that he had just already said everything he wanted to say, and that was recorded in His Word, the Bible. So, I would pray and the Bible would respond. A few words of spontaneous prayer, usually requests for help and blessing and prayers for others, as well as private Bible reading were the essence of my Protestant spirituality.

Orthodoxy offered a different perspective to me on prayer, beginning with the proposition that even though prayer is about a personal relationship with God, I do not approach God alone. My prayers are linked with the prayers of the Church, not only now but throughout all time, as we approach the Holy Trinity as the Church who also comes to meet us. I see my personal prayers as an extension of the prayers of the Church, which are mediated and made possible by Christ's redemptive work. Even though my personal prayers are done in private and not as a public display in church, my prayer is not based on a relationship of just me and God; not only am I not alone when I approach God and in communion with the body of Christ, but God is never alone.

As I began to realize that my personal prayer, ergo my personal relationship with God, is rooted in my participation in the active prayer life of the Church, not only in my local parish where two or three are gathered (usually many more), but the universal and catholic church, even when I am praying at home by myself, this gave me a better frame of reference and direction for my prayers, a firm context that isn't totally based on what I believe, how I am feeling at the moment, whether I can keep the dialogue up, or whether or not I think my prayers are being answered.

Corollary to that epiphany, which really had a profound affect on me, is my realization that prayer is less about having an ongoing dialogue with God than it is about recognizing, giving attention to, and being responsive to the presence of God, who is everywhere and in all things. Rather than giving a monologue to God or relying on my imagination to conjure hie response, prayer is an elevation of consciousness through grace. Grace is the presence of God, through which he manifests his energies, and in prayer I can actively commune with him, both formally at church and in private at home, as well as in everything that I do throughout the day and night. I approach God in communion with others in the Church to commune, as a communion, with God (who is also a Trinity of three divine persons in communion with each other), and as the church I have the potential to commune with him spontaneously in and through all of life.

Finally, the prayer of the heart, or the Jesus prayer, also has influenced me positively as one of the means through which I am responsive to the presence of God in all things. The Jesus prayer -- "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner" -- when it becomes established in the heart, can become the continual cry of the whole person, and I find myself saying or thinking or praying it without effort, even when I am not entirely conscious of it, and yet it draws me further in. It is a way to pray unceasingly that isn't mere repetition, nor a reliance on my ability to keep a discursive monologue going.

Other significant changes have followed these realizations. some practical, including the use of written prayers to establish my own interior prayers, the use of chant and icons and incense, and being able to pray to saints to ask them to pray for me. There would be too much to say in one post to address all the foregoing, but they may become topics for future posts.

If you have found this article helpful, please consider supporting the efforts of Gravitus Vulgaris through your prayers as well as your gracious donation.

]]>Wed, 06 Jul 2016 17:36:50 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/the-problem-with-shameThere is a lot of equivocation over the apparently ambiguous word "shame." In contemporary parlance, it has a psychological meaning which denotes a person's total identification with a negative behavior or transgressive status.

We live in a culture where behavior is usually socially regulated by guilt, rather than shame. We are each personally responsible in this context, and when we break laws, rules or social norms, we become guilty in a judicial sense. The role of shame in a guilt culture emphasizes our transgressive identities as those who take on outsider status due to deviation, and the only way to redeem oneself, if possible, is through the payment of a debt, either to society, or through the justice system, or through the enactment of revenge scenarios that are played out as “justice,” wherein one gets whatever punishment it is that is deserved in relation to her transgression.

The problems with understanding the regulation of moral behavior in terms of guilt are many, including the notion that redemption is essentially an abstract transaction wherein a wrathful God demonstrates punishment against his son in order to redeem sinners. Moral behavior is codified into abstract formulations as well. Rather than being transformed people who exemplify conduct that flows from the heart, one becomes moral merely by living according to a set of principles or codes. Bad behavior is not primarily addressed through seeking to heal the soul that sins, but rather through punishment, which has been shown through numerous studies to not have any long-term behavioral effect.

Shame cultures focus less on individual responsibility and abstract legal transactions, and more on how one’s betrayal of the community creates estrangement and stigma. In a guilt culture, if I do something wrong and the public does not know about it, I am still expected to feel guilty and to seek to make amends by being punished. This is not the case in a shame culture. In a shame culture, if I do something wrong and there is no public knowledge of it, then I experience no shame, and have no motivation to seek amends. Shame is all about public identity, and whether or not one is honored or dishonored.

In a shame culture, to become a criminal is to be seen by society as an object of dishonor, worthy of public humiliation and expulsion. This is why the Scriptures say that Jesus is a participant in shame, particularly at the point of his crucifixion on the cross. To die publicly in such a manner after being mocked and beaten is the ultimate demonstration of punishment in a culture of shame. But this is not the only way in which Jesus walks on the path of shame; he also visits and dines with tax-collectors, who are regarded as political enemies in occupied Israel. He doesn’t shun prostitutes. He speaks to a Samaritan woman at the well. Over and over again, Jesus identifies with the subjects of shaming in a culture of shame, and through him all are comforted and shame is taken away.

But there is absolutely no implication that Jesus internalizes or feels shame, even when he is being put to death on the cross. Such an assertion would be totally scandalous and possibly heretical. While Jesus repeatedly identifies with the positions of shame, he does so in order to break up and transfigure the apparatuses of power that stigmatize those who are marginalized, while bringing healing to the abject, and he calls us to do the same, to visit prisoners, feed the hungry, heal the sick. The implication is that shame and the stigma it produces is toxic and harmful. It is one of the cords of oppression that Jesus breaks through the power of his life, witness, death and resurrection.

In our present culture, people are beginning to understand how harmful shame is and the destructive power it wields in the lives of those who are its captives. Dr. Brene Brown, for instance, discusses how shame works as a destructive force in the lives of people from all walks of life, not just those who have been abused or suffer from addictions. Dr. Gabor Maté goes into great depth showing how shame furthers addiction and can often have fatal consequences, since a person living under the rubric of shame is more inclined to hide than to seek help. Shame tells us that we are something we essentially are not; it has an existential spirit in that it implies we are what we do, and makes people think they are incapable of change. As such, there is no place for shame in Christian life.

I think the equivocation comes in when we confuse shame with humility, vulnerability, meekness, contrition, sorrow or moral failure. I do not understand it in any context as any of these better vehicles for becoming self-aware and approaching God. I do not believe there is any place for shame, properly defined, in the kingdom of God, either as a soteriological mechanism nor as any kind of impulse related to humility or repentance.

My argument is based on the fact that shame is basically an experience of pride on the negative end of the spectrum. It is a product of comparison, which is itself opposed to humility and meekness, whether you are comparing yourself to the conventions of society, a moral code, or to God’s purity and righteousness. You cannot have shame without pride. In fact, I might go so far as to say that both are one and the same, operating in the same modality, but experienced in different circumstances. As such, it is not at all the same as humility, which is transparency and self-knowledge that arises from self-awareness.

Humility begins within and moves outward. It is transparent and does not seek to hide. Shame is dependent on conventions, forms and the judgments of others, including self-judgment that arises when one does not measure up to one’s own imagined (false and inflated) view of oneself. Shame, like pride, is a function of the inflated ego. Shame is how pride reacts when an inflated ego is deflated. You cannot have shame without pride.

The experience that one has that leads to metanoia (the Greek word for repentance), as evidenced for example in the story of the prodigal, is one of awakening, not of shaming. Repentance itself is a change of mind, a redirection of one’s focus and path ― it is not self-flagellation or punishing oneself due to remorse.

Becoming aware of one’s own flaws and sins and darknesses is not pleasant, and might be shameful ― but that’s a danger to the psyche, not a virtue. It is an experience that should evoke an acceptance of one’s own culpability, one’s own myopia, as well as one’s own pretenses and attempts to cover up who they really are. It’s important to remember who we really are both in terms of being the sons and daughters of God, essentially glorious, as well as inheritors of death, stained by the disease of sin and severely limited by the fact of our creaturliness.

Made in God’s image and called to God’s likeness, I am a creature who is impure, rough, difficult, addicted, who often behaves badly, lies and deceives, and then tries to cover it all up and present myself as closer to the likeness than anyone else. The human psyche in its subordination to death may be farcical, but it doesn’t help in any way to suggest that shame is any kind of antidote in any way whatsoever. Humility, contrition, awareness, lack of comparison and judgment, sorrow or compunction for the way I have hurt others, and even the strong hunger for the experience of communion with God are far more likely antidotes that motivate us to true repentance.

Shame is used as a tool to influence and exert power over others. Sermons that rely on shame contradict the command of Christ, when he tells his disciples, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.” Making other people feel shame in order to control them is toxic and destructive. It is a grave sin.

Shame motivates us to sham repentance because like guilt, it stems from an abstract, exterior source, namely, what others think of us. Shame is a form of pride. The last thing one should do when approaching God is to care about what other people think. Rather, we should go to confession with humility, sadness over our sins, and a willingness to turn away from them.​

]]>Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:48:27 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/hell-and-the-love-of-god-reduxThere is an Orthodox tradition that hell is the ongoing eternal presence of God experienced by those who have chosen not to be in communion with him.

Note: The following is a minor revision of an article I wrote originally published in 2010 for the Huffington Post. The piece picked up some traction with nearly 2,000 FaceBook likes and 640 shares. Given its popularity, I thought it might be worth it to revisit the theme.

​Common depictions of the Christian doctrine of hell, borrowing images from popular imagination rather than from tradition, portray it as a place of literal fire, where tortured souls repose in anguish, a vision much used by itinerant evangelists and manipulative preachers. One might think of the famous sermon of the revivalist Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" to get an idea:

[N]atural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold 'em up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out; and they have no interest in any mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them. In short, they have no refuge, nothing to take hold of, all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted unobliged forbearance of an incensed God. [from http://bit.ly/1c7yvhN, accessed 6/28/2016.]

A further degradation of this cartoon vision finds human souls not only suffering extreme torture, but prodded by red devils with tiny horns, cloven hoofs for feet, spiraling tails, and pitchforks at hand, a caricature used to both trivialize the concept as well as mock the very idea of hell.

In the Revelation of John, we discover a lake of fire, prepared for the devil and his angels, as an abode of punishment, as well as a bottomless abyss. Jesus himself, of course, named hell as the place where the worm doesn’t die and the fire is never quenched, but he spoke of eternal darkness as well, eternal destruction and eternal death.

Such descriptions are at best figurative, much like other parts of the Bible where, for instance, God is described as a hen brooding over her chicks (God isn’t literally a fowl.) Rather, it seems apparent that according to the teachings of the ancient Church, the non-literal descriptions of hell that appear in Scripture and elsewhere pertain to fundamental qualities of a disposition of being, not one defined primarily as punishment, but of death.

Strains of western Catholicism and Protestantism have fundamentally defined death as legal punishment, an expression of God’s wrath. Death is entrenched within a judicial context; it is a sentence for sin. God is angry, according to the western view, and Christ’s merit applied to us satisfies his anger, so He dies as a sacrifice to appease the Father. We see that clearly in the quote from Edwards above.

A gross oversimplification and popular notion of the historical understanding of death in the West paints an ugly and frightening picture for those who take it seriously. Good people or redeemed people who have faith in Jesus, whom the Father punishes in our place through an expression of divine anger, overcome the punishment of death and go to heaven; unrepentant sinners suffer their just punishment and are cast howling into hell for their evil deeds. Death is the judicial sentence of all humanity; some overcome it totally through an abstract and forensic transaction, others do not.

The Greek fathers and the eastern churches historically do not share the western legal emphasis, nor the consequent view of atonement. The fathers of the church teach that humanity is the author of death, not God. St. Basil in the fourth century writes, “God did not create death, but we brought it upon ourselves.” Death is the result of sin; it is the final product that we, apart from God, create for ourselves through the power of the human will, that also ensnares and condemns us.

For the Christian Orthodox, death is much more than what happens when the lungs quit, the heart fails or the brain stops functioning; it is also the source of corruption and spiritual myopia, producing deep-rooted fear and a whole legion of consequent disorders, maladies, pathologies and suffering. The separation of the spirit and the body at the end of physical life is the culmination of a long period of smaller separations; existence is filled with estrangement. Death is embodied by division and the truncation of significance. As the late Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann writes:

When we see the world as an end in itself, everything in itself becomes a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the “sacrament” of God’s presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse. [For the Life of the World, SVS Press​].

It is possible to envision death, defined in this way, as at least tolerable -- an eternal separation from God without proactive torture, as it were, somewhat akin to the figurative description of hell in C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, but if we posit the reality of redemption, that is, from a certain perspective, the added imposition of the presence of infinite and divine personality figuratively signified by fire, death then takes on a further dimension. Death doesn’t dissolve away into nothingness, but energized by the presence of creative, personal and divine love, it becomes a separation fixed in an eternal disposition. Death is transmuted into bitter torment and despair.

As St. Symeon the New Theologian writes:

God is fire and when He came into the world, and became man, He sent fire on the earth, as He Himself says; this fire turns about searching to find material — that is a disposition and an intention that is good — to fall into and to kindle; and for those in whom this fire will ignite, it becomes a great flame, which reaches Heaven. ... [T]his flame at first purifies us from the pollution of passions and then it becomes in us food and drink and light and joy, and renders us light ourselves because we participate in His light. (Discourse 78)

The same fire, the love of God, that ignites in the hearts of the faithful transmutes in the experience of those who reject it into the fire of hell; it purifies the former, but burns the latter, per St. Isaac the Syrian:

​It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth, and is unquestionably given commonly to all. But love’s power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it. (Homily 84)

Hell in this view is understood as the presence of God experienced by a person who, through the use of free will, rejects divine love. He is tortured by the love of God, tormented by being in the eternal presence of God without being in communion with God. God’s love is the fire that is never quenched, and the disposition and suffering of the soul in the presence of God who rejects him is the worm that does not die. Whether one experiences the presence of love as heaven or hell is entirely dependent on how he has resolved his own soul to be disposed towards God, whether communion or separation, love or hatred, acceptance or rejection.

Hell, then, is not primarily a place where God sends people in his wrath, or where God displays anger against sinners, but rather, it is the love of God, experienced by one who is not in communion with him. The figurative, spiritual fire of God’s love is transcendent joy to the person purified and transfigured by it through communion in the body of Christ, but bottomless despair and suffering to the person who rejects it, and chooses to remain in communion with death.

Update, 2016: Six years after writing this piece, and thinking further on the subject, a couple of thoughts occur to me. In the first place, I think the idea of God's love as manifest in his presence being torturous remains a metaphor, and is analogous to an ontology I cannot grasp. The basic idea that God's love is experienced either as love and bliss by those who are in communion with him, or torture and despair by those who are not in communion but remain in the domain of death speaks to the idea that hell, like death, is the subjective product of the human capacity to turn away from God.

So, I think this works well as a conceptual signpost, but that it would be a mistake to substitute the map for the territory. What the actual territory is like is up for debate because it is unknown, and possibly beyond any present available conception.

The problem with taking this description literally is that it tends to make God out to be mechanical or akin to a chemical reaction which produces results based on our own disposition or composition. But the love of God is not a chemical or fire -- these are metaphors. God's love is bound up mysteriously in his Triune personality, of which we may become partakers, which invokes the idea of personal relationship and all its corollary divine liberties. So while I think this understanding of hell is better and truer than the legalism offered by Edwards and others in our present culture, it shouldn't be taken as a literal or exhaustive exposition of the whole story, but rather as an approach and insight of the heart.

Also, Alexander Kalomiros develops some of these ideas further in his 1980 presentation, The River of Fire.

]]>Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:00:20 GMThttp://www.ordinarygravity.com/home/fundamentalism-and-cognitive-distortionsDespite the evasions of people who would like to pretend otherwise and dismiss it, fundamentalism is not just a bad name that some people call others they disagree with, but it is a very real mode and approach to understanding reality. Although the word may sometimes be used as a pejorative, fundamentalism is real. I know from experience.

Many of the fundamentalists I have known are good, nice and even educated people, not unintelligent or given to violence. As usual, the common stereotype presents an extreme caricature, and few people seem to realize that by definition the term "fundamentalism" covers an extremely large population that includes a wide range of people.

What all Christian fundamentalists have in common, however, is their existence as a fear-based reaction to modernism. Fundamentalism has its beginning in the early part of the twentieth century. Its initial products are the doctrines of infallibility and inerrancy as characteristics of Scriptural inspiration. The emphasis is on literalism, whether one is interpreting the Bible or tradition, and is applied in multi-varied ways and not usually consistently.

Modernism is the bogey-man of fundamentalist thought because it seems to provide a contradictory narrative of reality. For instance, if Darwinism presents a story about a universe that has been evolving for billions of years in which humans have been gradually shaping up for millions of years rather than just five or six thousand, a conflict arises when one purports a literal, infallible and inerrant understanding of the first chapters of Genesis.

Never mind if those chapters were never understood to be literal accounts and served other purposes in the histories of both Judaism and Christianity. If you are a fundamentalist, evolution challenges what you understand to be the basis of your faith, and as such is something to be feared and denied. As a result, fundamentalism distorts the actual history and content of the tradition from which it stems.

Fundamentalism as a fear-based reaction to modernism embodies many of the thought processes and characteristics that are described in psychological terms as cognitive distortions. In describing fundamentalism, I am borrowing a basic list from the Psych Central article, 15 Common Cognitive Distortions by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. The following describes the fundamentalist way of thinking rather well, though of course not exhaustively.

Polarized Thinking. Also known as "black or white" thinking, this plays out constantly in the fundamentalist need for certainty in all matters. There is no room for nuance or complexity, and those who do make such allowances are considered "wishy-washy." Certainty is a mechanism for allaying fear.

Overgeneralization. This is also a fallacy in which specific events are generalized to represent a more general or universal conclusion. For the fundamentalist, one appeals to an "essential" stereotype or phenomena, such as, for instance, the whole idea of secularism or modernism as monolithic thought systems, or singling out particular characteristics that are then applied to Darwinists, the LGBT community, liberals, atheists, and others.

Jumping to Conclusions. ​This one is obvious, and Grohol's definition characterizes fundamentalist behavior well: "Without individuals saying so, we know what they are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, we are able to determine how people are feeling toward us."

Catastrophizing. Fundamentalists think the rest of culture is out to get them, which leads to conspiracy theories based on spotty evidence, eschatological schemes that imply imminent end of the world scenarios threaded together and rationalized by dubious current events. Think: the so-called war on Christmas, or the notion that gay marriage somehow poses a threat to the institution of marriage itself. Modernism or "secular humanism" of course poses a serious threat when one catastrophizes.

Blaming. A hallmark of health and maturity is knowing that blame never produces any constructive or helpful results, whether one blames others for problems or oneself. Fundamentalists do both. In extreme examples, fundies like Pat Robertson. as well as others, may blame natural disasters on what they consider to be national sins. But this happens in a more subtle way as well. One's suffering, for instance, may be attributed to lack of faith or sin (cf. Job's pals), when many people suffer through no fault of their own.

Shoulds. Grohol's definition captures it: "We have a list of ironclad rules about how others and we should behave. People who break the rules make us angry, and we feel guilty when we violate these rules. A person may often believe they are trying to motivate themselves with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if they have to be punished before they can do anything."

Fallacy of Change. Grohol: "We expect that other people will change to suit us if we just pressure or cajole them enough." Authoritarian fundamentalist sermons tend to be heavy on blame, threats, accusations and emotional appeals. The idea that we can get someone to change by shaming them into it is a popular notion, but extremely fallacious. It just doesn't work. Quite to the contrary, shame reifies unwanted behaviors because the shamed person identifies with them.

Always Being Right. Grohol, though not writing about fundamentalism but rather common cognitive distortions, sums up the fundamentalist need for certainty as a reaction to modernism well: "We are continually on trial to prove that our opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and we will go to any length to demonstrate our rightness. For example, “I don’t care how badly arguing with me makes you feel, I’m going to win this argument no matter what because I’m right.” Being right often is more important than the feelings of others around a person who engages in this cognitive distortion, even loved ones." For the fundamentalist, being right is absolutely necessary for identity. Since his or her beliefs are assumed to be absolute truth, based on inerrant literal interpretations of the Bible, or in the case of Orthodox fundies, canons and cherry-picked writings of the fathers as well, to admit the possibility of being wrong is necessarily a betrayal of faith, and therefore a sin.

Rigidity Confused with Integrity.This one is mine, and not necessarily known as a cognitive distortion, though it is a distortion in fundamentalist thinking. The idea that one must stick to principles and be unbending, and that this constitutes integrity, is fairly popular, but it is an error. Genuine integrity has more do with understanding and accepting one's own flaws and limitations than it does with adhering to abstract principles. A real person with integrity can admit when she is wrong, or when she doesn't have an answer to a particular question, and can and should be flexible as a characteristic of humility and love.